Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the whole spectrum of resources employed by their operations. Due in part to government regulation, tax treatment, enterprise efficiency and changes in goodwill, facilities must now take into account how all types of sustainability factors affect their organization's expenses and practices. For example, a manufacturing plant cannot focus exclusively on raw material and equipment. To comply with regulation, secure favorable pricing and avoid penalties, businesses must consider sustainability factors such as the rate and timing of energy use and the generation of byproducts such as carbon emissions.
To address regulatory, economic and environmental issues, many companies continue to monitor and attempt to forecast activities and events that impact their sustainability. Current monitoring generally considers high-level energy and byproduct totals, but may lack a comprehensive view of other sustainability factors. In some instances, these totals are calculated to per-area metrics for a facility. Future quantities used and produced are estimated based predominantly on seasonal historical data. These estimates can be very inaccurate and are susceptible to sizeable inconsistencies. Errors in resulting approximations can result in decreased efficiency, increased expenses and operational bottlenecks.
Software packages such as Pavilion™ Real-time Environmental Management and Software CEM™ are targeted to mitigate specific concerns such as emissions compliance. The Pavilion software can measure emissions from multiple sources within a facility to provide continuous calculation and scheduled reporting, and can facilitate data processing via analytical engines to provide predictive emissions monitoring. However, managers can benefit from complete information describing not only emissions, but other sustainability factors and their interrelationships.
Accordingly, one challenge presented by the existing estimations is the difficulty in fully appreciating one or more impacts of individual processes or components on energy and other sustainability factors. For example, it may be difficult for a company to determine the appropriate productivity to maximize the value of an emissions credit because emissions may not vary with total production in a predictable fashion. In this case, evaluation of an entire facility may provide alternative valuation to techniques focusing exclusively on emissions-generating components. In another example, a plant performing changes to its processes may spike their peak energy use and incur a penalty. General overhead estimations may not provide sufficient planning context to allow for informed decision-making on sustainability factors. It would therefore be beneficial to determine more accurate representations of the contribution or consumption associated with a specific component or process independently.
Another challenge exists in properly utilizing facility information. Simulation tools are often used by engineers and managers to perceive the flow and consumables of facility activity. However, sustainability factors for industrial plants are typically viewed from a top-down perspective that often makes it difficult to distinguish the source of certain expenditures. Accordingly, it would be useful to enable a component-specific modeling and simulation environment to improve understanding of particular processes or components on consumption and sustainability factors.